Summary of "Using literary text in language teaching"-LinQing

    This article first reviews the importance of using literature in teaching language skills, which can help students expose to authentic material and cultural information to develop their overall foreign language competence. But how can we choose the literary texts? The author gave us three suggestions. First, we should think about the appropriateness, which is to say that the lexis, grammar and style of the texts must relate to students' levels of command of English. Second, we should inform students the cultural background or knowledge before they get to read the texts. Third, we should take the pleasure and enjoyment into consideration to inspire students to be interested in reading and interpreting the works. I think the most interesting part of the article is the useful part of introducing pedagogic approaches. Whatever the approaches we adopt, they are mainly related to three models: the cultural model, the language model and the personal growth model, which can not only help students develop their language skills, but also provide them educational value, affective value, individual value and stimulus value. I think the activities the author suggested us to use are very helpful for our teaching, such as finding out strong lines, storytelling, gap filling, giving storylines before the text reading and creative writing. But in my eyes, all of the activities are designed based on a Task-based teaching, and the structure of the task is usually as the following steps: preparation - pre task - task - planning - report - post-task - activity - language focus - language practice and optional followup, which is a well-integrated approach to language teaching. No matter how different our classes are, we all should remember to introduce the literary texts in language teaching on the condition that "know what your students need, want, lack and desire in their study of literature."